"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010

Saturday, January 26, 2013

The pop-hack who's aged and cranky,Whose work is an overused hanky,His vilification?Just prevaricationHis blog profile, boring and skanky

Update, An Explaination:

I'm still being trolled on other blogs I can't moderate by the former pop-music critic Steve Simels who is reduced to blogging since his pay job of writing about crap music is more suited to someone a third his age instead of someone trying to do what that oh, so important figure in culture, Dick Clark, did more credibly, extend adolescence into senescence. Only my personal troll is pretending to be kew-wel at the same time, a hipster in his own mind, someone eternally trying to pretend he's living Next Stop Greenwich Village but always closer to being one of the kids dancing on the floor on American Band Stand, trying to get into camera range to be discovered, than he is someone with his pretended intellectual and artistic significance. Only, when he realizes that at his age, that train left the platform about forty years ago and, so, he pretends that's not what he's so obviously still up to.

A while back I began a blog called Not All Atheists Are Assholes (But This Blog Is About The Ones Who Are). Someone who happened to come across it during a google search told me about a post from last fall from Hemant, the owner of The Friendly Atheist blog*. The theme of it was

A Great Response to the Question ‘Why Do Atheists Seem Like Assholes?’

For anyone who frequents leftish blogs, who isn't an atheist the obvious answer is that so many atheists who one encounters while participating in liberal discussion ARE ASSHOLES. Though that's not the self-serving answer Hemant and Julia Sweeney give. I'll let you read that at the link above.I've been spending a lot of time on Alternet this past month to see what's there to be seen, it's a mix of original content and an accumulator of other online stuff originating on other websites. One thing that's there to be seen and can't be missed is that it relies on the asshole atheist community to run up its hit count by providing them with atheist ditto-head fodder. Some of it checks out on fact checking, though a lot of it is ideologically slanted. Some of it is entirely false.

A lie told by atheists on an allegedly liberal website is as much a lie as one told by Rush 0r Glenn or Daddy Phelps. It is as much a lie as one told by Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin

Pointing out the inaccuracy of this food for hate is not welcome among these self-congratulating members of the "reality community". And, clearly, the people who run Alternet aren't much on fact checking when it's an opportunity to keep the athehaters on their site.

This has been my experience at Eschaton, Democratic Underground, Alternet, the Scienceblogs, a number of the Discover blogs, ... after a while you start to suspect there's a pattern there. If atheists want to have hate groups as their public face that's their decision. It will rub off on them. Those of us on the left who are not atheists have no reason, at all, to let a hate group to become associated with the left.

The New Atheists Are The Phelps Cult Inverted

* If you could sue someone for false labeling Hemant would be in hot water because his friendly blog is just another of the cooky cutter atheist hate talk blogs.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Fossilized Liberals c. 1957 , from the period before second wave feminism. That's what I'm encountering among the self-defined liberals when discussing prostitution-porn (prostitution with voyeurism). All the same urban myths, all the same bromides and buzzwords, all the same weird assumptions of the virtuousness of what they fervently believe is their au courant, up to date sexy transgression Only, it's just the same old stuff that should have died off forty years ago. The fact is that, as Gloria Steinem said, the sexual revolution wasn't our war. "Our" means women, GLBT people, anyone who has had sex used as a means of their oppression.

Being gay, having been out before Stonewall (thank God I was born a musician), having seen it all from the anti-gay oppression of the 50s and the Mad Men era (there was no one who was more anti-gay than a "liberal" man of that period), the early days of gay liberation, which began BEFORE STONEWALL, the 1970s with its explosion in open gay sexuality and sex, when anal sex became the norm and was, in many circles, politically required, to the disaster of AIDS and the all too temporary use of science to inform sexual practice, to the "Aids is Over" idiocy and on to today when unprotected anal sex is not only on the rebound among gay men (with increased HIV positivity) but among straight men, many of whom seem to love the very real sense of domination that comes with it and women who go along with it, through coercion or the more subtle and effective coercion of being afraid of being called a prude or, in the case of the boys I'm arguing with "Schoolmarmish" (really, that word was used).

Now Mr. Liberal, "The_Dude404," is lecturing me about gay sex. Here's my last answer to him.

As a gay man who lived through the AIDS crisis, let me inform you, straight boy, anal sex is dangerous. That is a fact as scientifically supported as anything that comes out of the CDC. It used to be relatively rare among gay men I knew before the 1970s. Of the gay men I knew then, not a single one who didn't practice anal sex has become infected with HIV. Including myself. I'm unaware of the hepatitis status of that group but anal sex is also known as carrying an enhanced risk of that frequently fatal disease. I remember gay men in the early 1970s talking as if having hepatitis was a rite of passage. Having taken quite a bit of biology in college, knowing the link between hepatitis and liver disease, I was appalled and aware that things were headed for disaster. But the version of "sex pos" (so many of us never seem to have felt in the least "sex neg") that was current among gay men back then ran its course and many, many thousands have died from the results of sexually transmitted diseases that they'd never have caught if they'd either practiced frottage or they'd have been much less likely to have caught if they'd always used a condom and avoided transmission.How 'bout you, straight boy? You going for some anal action without protection AS SO MANY PROSTITUTES ARE REQUIRED TO BY THE MEN WHO USE THEM AND THE PIMPS WHO BEAT THE HELL OUT OF THEM IF THEY REFUSE.

The Founding Fathers' dead hand is still impeding progress. They didn't intend for women, people of color, white men who weren't property owners to have any say in anything and their influence, their paranoid fear of a democratic government impeding their accumulation of wealth, especially through the extension of equality to those groups, has been one of the unmentioned things we've struggled against. American conservatism is based in that paranoid fear of egalitarian democracy, that is the most enduring legacy of the founding FATHERS.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Why does this remind me of posters of war refugees c. 1946? Imagine the deprivation of that family of six making only $650,000 and that single person making $230,000. Sort of makes you want to take up a collection, doesn't it.

On Comments

This is a blog for adults and I intend to keep it that way.

I've been forced to go back to moderating comments since some people abused the privilege. Adulthood confers privileges that childishness shouldn't. Please be patient, barring accidents, any comment that should be posted will be.

ABOUT MUSIC VIDEOS

I post music videos to inspire you to support living, working musicians, to buy their recordings so they can continue with their music and to buy the recordings of artists who have passed so their music will be preserved and available into the future.

About Me

I am a gay man, a religious man, an equality absolutist, a democrat, and a primitive socialist who believes that the means of production are by right in the ownership of those who produce wealth. I am an environmentalist of the extreme kind who is convinced that the way things are going now will lead to the extinction of people, of many other species of life for the benefit of a pathologically greedy elite who must be stopped and leveled with the rest of us. If that's not radical enough, I believe that reality is real and that most of what gets called liberalism and leftism in the United States is an impotent fraud based in fashion and the conceit of a bunch of elitists who delight in despising people they consider beneath them. Thus the political impotence of that style of pseudo-liberalism which is merely a liberalish-libertarianism. My heroes include Shirley Chisholm, Martin Luther King jr. the liberation theologians, and a few politicians, Senator Whitehouse and Sanders, many of the members of the Congressional progressive and black caucuses and other politicians who actually struggle to change laws and make real lives really better.

On Being Disreputable

After seven years of being told that what I've said is beyond the bounds of ... something, they're hardly ever specific, and that I'm just awful, I've decided to go with that.